


an infinite variety of horses

by scioscribe



Category: Justified
Genre: Gen, Last words, Memories, Trapped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-27
Updated: 2012-05-27
Packaged: 2017-11-06 03:04:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/414004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Oh, Raylan,” he said, and what he heard in his voice was the blood-loss, spun like silk thread into the finest kind of joy. “All those paths we could have taken, how the hell do you think we ended up here?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	an infinite variety of horses

“There was a pale horse—”

“Remember that one from Sunday school,” Raylan said. “And a Johnny Cash song.”

“Now, I am not discussing the apocalypse with you, Raylan, despite its seeming relevance to our current predicament. In this story—”

Boyd started coughing then and couldn’t seem to get himself stopped; Raylan hauled him upright a little and smacked a hand right between his shoulder blades that did nothing in particular, so far as Boyd could tell, but eventually the weight on his chest eased a fraction, and he was able to lay back again. Raylan let him. Though God knew Raylan made a poor excuse for a pillow, all kinds of bones and sharp edges, and his clothes soaked through with sweat and Boyd’s blood.

“In this story,” Boyd went on, “there is an infinite variety of horses.”

“Boyd, so far as I can tell, talking isn’t something you want to be doing much of right now, sad as I am to not hear the end of this particular tale.”

Boyd lifted up a hand to his chest. What he could feel was not much of anything, and that told him more than anything else. He let his hand fall down again, and it hit the ground with a sort of slap. He couldn’t feel so much of that, either. It was a numbness like morphine, deadening him from the edges in, and if it were already in his chest, he supposed he could make a fair estimate of how much time he had before that hard-won breath ran out of him for good. He stretched out a foot, looking down across the sprawled-out mess of his body, the bloodied shirt, and hooked the Coleman lantern with his boot and scraped it closer to them, so that he could see himself a little better. It was that kind of story he wanted to tell. He spent some time looking at all the blood, and at the black prints all around it from where Raylan, hands gritty-silky with coal dust, had tugged him up and looked him over. He matched his hand to the dark ghost of Raylan’s. They were almost of a size.

“I don’t suppose much about this situation surprises me,” he said.

“Well, that seems like the kind of clairvoyance you might have brought forth before the shooting started, and you got yourself trapped in a damn coal mine, and me with you. It don’t do much good after the fact.”

Boyd turned around the middle of that— _and me with you_ —and said, as gently as he could, “I wouldn’t worry overmuch about this going poorly for you, Raylan. It’s who you are. If there’s a light in here to find, you’ll get to it. If there’s a way out—” It wasn’t a cough so much as it was a stone that fell against him, right there at the sternum, and stole his air away. A cave-in of sorts, a tumbledown. No one called fire in the hole, he thought, and the wavery lantern-light sucked itself away from the edges of his vision, all things dark as, well, a coal mine at midnight.

Raylan caught hold of his hand so hard the bones seemed to grate together. “Not now, Boyd. You just stay right here, damn it.”

Somehow, Boyd did. He rolled his head back against Raylan’s shoulder. “You won’t die here. You always make it out of Harlan. You’re Raylan Givens.”

Raylan stayed quiet for longer than Boyd would have liked him to; without Raylan as a source of conversation in his last hours, dying was going to prove a fiercely dull occupation.

“It wasn’t my intention, strictly speaking, to leave without you. That first time.”

When they were nineteen, and Raylan’s hand had been as sweat-slick and coal-dusted as it was now when Boyd had grabbed it and pulled him out of the mine as the charges cracked behind them like whips and fireworks. He’d never known what Raylan was doing, standing back there, all moonstruck and calf-eyed, looking down into the dark yawning mouth, the throat of which they’d be climbing back down into soon enough. Raylan, nineteen years old, skinny as a pencil, with bruises that he didn’t care to discuss. He’d been gone not the next day, but the next week, and Boyd had spent a long time after with his ear turned to the emptiness below, the hard slabs of rock that he could break himself against. Trying to hear what Raylan had heard, and he thought it was what the army men were telling him, so he went to the desert, but it was just the mines again—all that sand just stone that had already been blown to pieces. The lick of fire underneath his hands, the certainty of what he was doing—at least that was the same, too.

If Raylan had asked, Boyd would have gone with him. But Raylan hadn’t asked.

Anything else was prettying up the past, putting flowers on a table where you’d have to sit down all the same to meat that had gone rancid and fly-blown—but Boyd didn’t want to die feeling spiteful towards Raylan, he truly didn’t. That wasn’t the truth. Anyone could take anything, some little fragment of time, and try to say it was the whole, the synecdoche, but that didn’t make it so.

“Oh, Raylan,” he said, and what he heard in his voice was the blood-loss, spun like silk thread into the finest kind of joy. “All those paths we could have taken, how the hell do you think we ended up here?”

Raylan laughed. A dry sound, like a knot of pine kindling bursting in a fire. “Just naturally foolish, I suppose.”

“You’ll give Ava my love, tell her I’m sorry we didn’t have more time? I am trusting you with that, despite your antipathy towards our relationship. I would hate to doubt your reliability.”

“I’ll tell her.”

Boyd thought then that some time passed, but he wasn’t sure—everything around him bent in the light and the shadows, like it was all made of water, and seen just through glass. He woke with a metal curve at his lips, and the taste of somehow stale, overly mineral water against his tongue. He drank until Raylan eased it back away from him. He wanted to wipe his mouth, where the liquid dribbled down a little against his chin, but his hands were no longer up to rising. He blew it away instead, lips flared out like a horse’s, which reminded him that there was not much time left for the last thing he wanted to say. But first, he thanked Raylan for the drink. “Which I trust you called, Moses-like, from the rocks around us.”

“Found a flask,” Raylan said, “within arm’s reach, no less. Must have been from a powerful temperance advocate to have water in it and not whiskey, this far down. Don’t know how old it is, but I can’t imagine water would go too bad, sealed up. Lid was tight.”

“Well, I can’t imagine it mattering one way or the other,” Boyd said. “So long as you don’t drink any your own self.”

“You’re not dying, Boyd.”

“It’s much too late in the day to make that case, after you’ve already promised to take my message to Ava. Once you’ve acknowledged a thing, you can’t take it back again. Now, that’s conversation in its most basic form.”

“I suppose. But it’s still not an entirely ludicrous proposition, that my people might track us down before you put your foot through the bucket for good.”

“All the same,” Boyd said. He supposed he was flattered, a little, that Raylan would shy away from telling him the truth now. They would be coming for Raylan, of that Boyd had no doubt, and they would lift him out of this perdition and back into the light, but what Boyd had left of his life could now be measured in minutes, and there simply was no way for him to think otherwise. “I did want to tell you about the horses.”

“The infinite variety of horses,” Raylan said softly.

“The very same.”

“What about the horses, Boyd?”

“I was sixteen.” If he closed his eyes, he could still see the green of the holler, and feel the wind against his face—the warm breeze that was scented with wildflowers. Boyd was not a woodsman by nature, but he had always had a fondness, all the same, for the unpredictability of those flowers which were not allowed into gardens, and which grew like weeds, or were weeds, all out in the country, in some subtle shades and in some riots of color, there to be stumbled upon when you were not looking for them. “Out walking, a little later than I had any business being out, but once the time for going home had passed, I was all the less inclined to head in that direction, if you understand me.”

He knew that Raylan did.

“Now, I’d hopped a fence a ways back, on the theory that I wasn’t intending any harm to anyone’s property, and they might at least pursue that as a line of questioning before resorting to a shotgun, but, my hand to God, it felt like at least a mile back behind me, all the way back in the trees. What I’m saying is that if it was a pasture, it was a pasture bigger than it had any right to be, is all, and no one we know would have put up such a thing. And no one we didn’t know would have been there to begin with. But all the same. Now, out of the woods, this was level ground, good grass without stones, and everything silver from the moonlight, and the stars. You remember how clear the sky gets, out there where things are lonesome.”

“I remember,” Raylan said.

“There was a pale horse,” Boyd said, and he could almost glimpse her again at the bottom of the darkness, way down in the mine—a flash of moon-glow. “A mare. And there was a chill in the air, but the ground was warm, so there was a little mist coming up, and there she was, standing in a cloud but on the earth all the same. I thought I’d fallen asleep walking, somehow, got to dreaming, but there were more behind her, a whole herd, and in all colors. Now, horses are animals, and for all their majesty, in the end they’re slobber from one end and shit from the other, and I’d never been the type to overlook it. But—Raylan—I’ve never seen the like of that night. All those horses, peaceful in their pasture, which was this impossible thing. Set to graze underneath the stars.”

“It does sound beautiful.”

“It made me feel like there was a world,” Boyd said. “Not just Harlan. There was a world, and there were these little patches in it of things worth saving, beautiful things.” He was so very tired. He said, “Raylan, I can’t feel my hands anymore.”

Raylan said, “They’re right here,” and when he looked down, Raylan was making new coal-dust smudges on his skin. He closed his eyes.

The story was almost over. “And I met you, and Ava, and it was like that.” He thought about the way the low mist clung to the ground, obscuring the hooves of the horses that looked at him with that strangely kindly disinterest, and the way Raylan had run with him out of the mines, as if they’d never stop, and the way Ava had settled his hand over the scar just above her heart. There were patches in the world, places that nothing else could touch or encroach upon, these impossible things that he had seen. _There was a pale horse._

“Raylan,” he said, because it seemed important, crucial. “Raylan. I think I can see the stars.”


End file.
